Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
It’s no accident that Coolfire Media, the same area production company that created Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s, is also responsible for Funeral Boss. Both reality shows feature charismatic St. Louis families who work (and argue) together at unusual businesses. Funeral Boss, which airs on the Discovery Fit & Health network, follows William Harris (wcharrisfd.com) and his large family as they comfort mourners and nettle one another at their North County funeral home.
• People know so little about what goes on in funeral homes; it’s all speculation, not facts. People are intrigued by this industry. It’s also a unique situation in that it’s all family in this funeral home.
• My mom and dad had gotten divorced, and I had a godfather in the funeral-home business, and I came up under him. Then I became a licensed director when I was just 18 years old, and I wanted to have my own place. Eighteen sounds young, but that just reassures me that this is my calling. I don’t shy away from it.
• I have four children, and they are absolutely jockeying amongst one another for control of the family business. I really value them, though. They’re a big help, , and they’re really learning the most important part of the business, handling the deceased and directing services. As soon as they become licensed, they’ll be in the position to see who’s the best-qualified to run it.
• If you watch the show, you’ll see the friction in my family. But at the end of the day, everybody still has the same issues in their families.
• We release four doves at the end of every service at the cemetery. There’s a company in O’Fallon, Mo., that we get them from. They fly back; they’re trained. Then we bring them right back to the company after the service. We used to have 150 doves of our own, but they contracted something and all died.
• To me, dressing sharp is a part of the job—and part of who I am, too. I have a closet full of a lot of clothes, organized by color. I name them after food colors, like watermelon and chocolate.
• We match the colors at every service. Whatever the deceased is wearing, our staff wears those colors. We have three big closets full of clothes for the employees.
• The last episode of the season is about a death in my family, along with my son’s wedding. The most memorable part is how I deal with death myself, when it’s my turn, so to speak. It actually happened last year. It was the patriarch of our family, Benjamin Brown, my father’s first cousin, but he was like our uncle.
• I don’t do odd requests for funerals, like they do on that other show, Best Funeral Ever. I’m a traditional funeral director. I do some things out of the box. I do some unusual marketing things; for instance, we do TV and Internet advertising and radio. That’s not really out of the norm, but in the African-American community, we don’t have a lot of advertisers.
• The divisions in the industry where people go to the funeral home that represents their family’s own ethnicity, that is starting to change a little bit. People are starting to go where they get the best bang for their buck.
• When you’re driving in the procession from the funeral home to the cemetery, for the most part, once you get that first car through, you’ve got it made. You do sometimes have other drivers who have no respect for the procession, so you have to roll with the punches. Motorcycle escort services by off-duty police officers help us out quite a bit.
• Every funeral director in America watched the show Six Feet Under. I thought it was very well done.
• I would never use “professional mourners.” That makes a mockery of the service. I have seen them before. That’s degrading to the family. Nobody grieves in that manner.
• If you don’t care about the families you’re helping, then you’re just in it for the money, not the people, and that’s not how it should be. To me that means your priority is not in the right place.
• We’ve gotten a lot of positive reviews about the show. People see a humorous side to this, that it’s not so somber and solemn at all times. You have to have some relief. Yet we’re professional. You have to be.
